


Love Me Now

by jat_sapphire



Category: The Professionals
Genre: Episode: s04e06 Discovered in a Graveyard, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, PWP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-07 16:43:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17964266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jat_sapphire/pseuds/jat_sapphire
Summary: I loveJohn Legend.  "Love Me Now"fits Bodie, Doyle, and "Discovered in a Graveyard."  Also Ash Wednesday.  And thanks to Dawnwind for choosing the title!





	Love Me Now

> _Pulling me further_  
>  _Further than I've been before_  
>  _Making me stronger_  
>  _Shaking me right to the core, oh_

Doyle slid into the passenger seat; Bodie threw him a grin and started the car. The day was bright and chilly, puddles gleaming like polished metal. Doyle felt giddy, kept grinning, licking his lips, smiling again. Going home! Bodie looked a little giddy as well.

"Beautiful day, eh, mate?" Doyle said.

"Well, no snow, no sleet, no rain. Yes, pretty good day."

They'd had this kind of trivial back and forth (couldn't really even call it conversation) over and over while Doyle had been in the hospital. In those early days, Doyle was full of painkillers, or worse, full of pain and waiting for the next dose. Banter was beyond him. But weather and food were simple enough topics even for his fogged brain, and Bodie seemed perfectly happy to natter about chips and rain for those minutes when Doyle was conscious enough to answer.

Doyle hadn't thought about it at the time--to be honest, he hadn't thought much at all--but whenever he left that heavy drugged sleep, Bodie was there: while dawn greyed the sharp edges of the window, the bedframe, the table; while the rain washed down and day looked like dusk; while the lamp made a bubble of warm light that stopped before it reached Bodie's face. Only when he startled awake in the deep night, woken to take a pill he didn't need until he woke, did he look past the night nurse and see an empty chair.

He rubbed his chest, remembering that unreasonable loneliness, and Bodie's breath caught, and the car jolted.

"Oi," Doyle scolded. Bodie shrugged the nearer shoulder but didn't say anything. 

> _I don't know what's in the stars_  
>  _Never heard it from above, the world isn't ours_  
> 

Doyle couldn't forget the visions during his coma: Mayli behind the gun, Cowley walking beside him making him explain his disillusion with a job that killed misled kids as often as hardened criminals, his own coffin looking tidy and peaceful--and Bodie, always Bodie, from the day they'd met to, well, a day that hadn't happened, because that coffin wasn't bought and Doyle's grave was still empty. He took a deep breath and rubbed his scar again, since Bodie was in the kitchen making tea for the two of them and wouldn't see it. "Milk in?" he called, because his two bottles had been shot to pieces, half into his body, and the milk would be off by now anyway even if it hadn't been sprayed across the rug.

There was a pause before Bodie answered, "...Yeah."

"You can't have shopped." Doyle hadn't meant to refer to that hospital vigil. Bodie didn't seem to mind, though. 

He brought the cups through, put one on the table near Doyle's hand and stood for a moment before sitting in an armchair and sipping. "Murphy," he said.

Doyle groaned theatrically. "Is there anything not in a tin?"

And at last Bodie grinned a little. "I made a list, sunshine. If he can read..."

"He's not Anson." Doyle pretended to be comforted, which he was. But the comfort was that Bodie had arranged for food to be in more than by which of their mates had actually shopped.

They both drank, eyeing each other over the edges of the cups, awkwardly silent until Doyle couldn't bear it any longer.

"Bodie," he began evenly. "I'm not plugged into any machines. I'm not wearing a mask. I'm not in a sodding hospital bed. I'm not even on--many--drugs any more. You don't have to sit across the bloody room!"

At first, Bodie had looked nervous, but by the end, when Doyle's voice had risen, he was surpressing a smile. "All right, you stroppy prat," he said and moved to sit on the couch, where they almost touched and it was almost like old times.

Not enough like the times Doyle had been remembering when he wasn't back in the coma's graveyard. "Come 'ere," he said softly.

Bodie did. He put his head on Doyle's shoulder, one arm across his waist, and gave a long sigh. Doyle half-turned his head, so his nose and mouth were buried in soft, dark hair, and took a deep breath himself. Eau de Bodie, the best smell in the world...or maybe not the _best_ Bodie smell. The thought made him snicker.

"What's that?" The voice sounded sleepy. No wonder, Doyle thought. Bodie hadn't even had a hospital bed.

"Get some kip, mate," Doyle said. "You look worn to a thread."

" _I_ do!" Bodie almost sat up. Doyle's hold tightened, and Bodie pulled for a moment and then relaxed again. Doyle stroked and ordered the hair that felt as sweet as it smelled. Bodie's weight seemed to melt onto Doyle, as his breath became deeper and more even, louder, not snoring but definitely asleep.

"You great lug," Doyle whispered, the pleasure of holding Bodie again moving him almost to tears. He tilted his head back into the sofa cushion and closed his own eyes, letting himself drift.

> _But I know what's in my heart_  
>  _If you ain't mine I'll be torn apart_

Back in the graveyard, Doyle looked down at his stained white t-shirt and around at the grey stones under the grey sky. He was alone. The wind whistled past as if he were in a Hollywood film.

Doyle frowned, searching the landscape for any glimpse of Bodie, but there was none. Where was he? How could Bodie be all right if they weren't together?

It seemed a long time that he'd felt that way, even before the shooting. What had made him walk away from Bodie that day, outside the courthouse? "But the job's blown up in our faces," Bodie'd said, and Doyle had flinched inside, as Bodie had shuddered in the car at being reminded of the scars. Doyle had been afraid, that was it, holding back from acknowledging how close they had been to those flames, those deaths.

But there was nothing like dying and coming back to teach a person what was really important.

Doyle woke, back in the lounge with Bodie sleeping in his arms and his muscles cramping. "Uhh," he groaned at the pain, and Bodie startled awake as if he'd heard a shot.

Mayli's shot.

He sat up, turned to Doyle and stared, eyes wide.

Reaching past his own discomfort, Doyle cupped the pale face in both hands, brushing a little back and forth with his fingertips, and spoke to the stark fear in Bodie's eyes. "I'm here. I'm right here. It's all right, we'll be all right." But his chest ached because someday it would not be right at all. Someday one of them would be alone and the other one dead. 

"Love me now." That was the truest thing he could say. 

"Oh, Ray." Bodie leaned forward and kissed him so tenderly that Doyle felt his eyes stinging. Then Bodie brought their foreheads together and closed his eyes.

"Bed, let's go to bed, Bodie, please."

> _I don't know who's gonna kiss you when I'm gone_  
>  _So I'm gonna love you now, like it's all I have_  
>  _I know it'll kill me when it's over_  
>  _I don't wanna think about it, I want you to love me now_

As much experience as each of them had at removing another person's clothes, Doyle was still astonished and humbled by Bodie's careful, gentle, _reverent_ way with buttons, belt buckle, jeans zip--as if he were unwrapping an icon or something made of blown glass. Unable to lift his arms or stand on one foot, Doyle had to adapt to Bodie's gradual unveiling, had to wait until he was lying on the bed to see Bodie pull off his own clothes in a hurry and drop them in an uncharacteristic mess on the floor.

But then he slowed down again. Before the shooting, Bodie might have launched himself onto the bed, might have stormed Doyle and swept him up, wildly touching and humping, kissing and biting. Often their sex had been like jumping into a whirlpool and being shot back out to lie gasping on the shore.

Now Bodie seemed mesmerised, laying his hands lightly against Doyle's skin, skimming slowly along his back, over his arse, down his thighs. He kissed so softly that his lips' touches felt like drops of rain.

Doyle writhed, pushing up against Bodie's touch, wrapping arms and legs around him. "More, harder, _Bodie_!" He sucked hard when he kissed, held tight where he grabbed, pulled Bodie's hair, used his teeth. When he got Bodie's cock and bollocks in his hands, he stroked, fingered, and pulled them in the ways he knew drove Bodie wild, talking all the time in the sexiest voice he could make. "I'm, I'm here, I'm alive, I'm--" gasping--"I can take it. Give it to me, Bodie, fuck, fuck me."

As he sat up and stared at Doyle, Bodie was visibly shaking, his breath heavy and his cock arched hard against his stomach. His eyes seemed as hot as the blue flame of a blow-torch. His mouth was a little open. He looked half-witted with lust.

Doyle swallowed hard. He flung out his arm to grab at the front of his bedside lamp stand, a grim fake-Bauhaus thing with a kind of cubby where he thought he'd left his lubricant. But the angle was wrong, and his arm just waved foolishly up and down.

Bodie reached out just as Doyle rolled to his side, and again to really touch, trailing across hip and arse and thigh as Doyle snagged the tube and rolled up to his hands and knees. Unsure if he could really hold this position, he still pushed the tube into the side of Bodie's hand, saying, "Now," in a voice he could hardly recognize himself.

But he ended up on his side in the bed, Bodie's mouth on the nape of his neck, folded in Bodie's arms, spooned around while Bodie unscrewed the tube's cap with one hand and his teeth. Doyle lifted his leg and laid it on Bodie, felt the lube squirt on top, and Bodie half-laughing as he wiped it away.

"Randy," he said into Doyle's ear, wet fingers wriggling round and round Doyle's arsehole.

"In, in, _in,_ you lazy slow sod, stop poncing about, get bloody on with it--" and Doyle's words collapsed into a groan as Bodie bit the side of his neck and got his finger inside at last. And then his cock. 

Doyle's eyes were closed, his hips were working, and the light in the room seemed to get brighter and brighter, his ribcage opening as he imagined it had on the operating table, only this time it was raw life swelling in him. He groaned again at Bodie pushing, pulling, stretching and filling him, unable to organize his mouth to say the words bursting in his head like skyrockets. _Love me now. I'm alive. You saved me. Bodie, love you. Don't stop--_

Which was, of course, when he did--stilled and then jerked in orgasm, his life literally pumping into Doyle, and feeling it, _realising_ it, made Doyle come himself with a sob he couldn't stop.

They lay together panting, drenched with sweat, until the cold made Doyle drag up to a sitting position and look at the duvet caught beneath them. "Move, pillock," he said, but the touch on Bodie's face was as gentle as Bodie's kisses had been before putting in the lube.

They resettled, still spooned together, under the duvet, and Doyle relaxed into Bodie's warmth that radiated like an open oven behind him. Also, he felt Bodie petting circles in the hair on his chest, nuzzling in the curls at his neck, moving his legs slightly to stir the hair on Doyle's calves. "Right here," Doyle murmured.

After a while, Doyle eased away and turned over, wanting to see Bodie's face. His eyebrows lay in an easy curve, his lips were still and calm, his lashes fanned against his cheeks as if they had been combed. As Doyle gazed, Bodie smiled, eyes still shut, and Doyle kissed lightly, not to disturb the descent into sleep.

But Bodie opened his eyes, and the shadow of worry came back, fainter than it had been, but Doyle asked anyway. "Are you still thinking about ..."

"All the time," Bodie said, just as he had that day in Venue Two.

"Me too," Doyle said.

"But I haven't, I don't ...." Then Bodie just pulled Doyle closer and kissed him.

"You saved me," Doyle said, needing to hear it aloud, to see Bodie as he heard it. "I would have bled out. I would have been _dead._ "

"I would've been dead," Bodie whispered, not merely repeating.

All the soft words and sweet names Doyle had used with birds crowded into his head, all of them wrong for Bodie. None of them enough. His throat felt too tight to use any of them anyway.

"Bodie," he whispered and kissed again, longer, trying to stroke his feelings into his partner with his tongue.

> _When we've done all that we could_  
>  _To turn darkness into light, turn evil to good_  
>  _Even when we try so hard_  
>  _For that perfect kind of love, it could all fall apart_

They were both better at lovemaking and fighting than at speaking their fears and love. But later, still in bed, Bodie spoke as he held Doyle alive. "I've always known. Always thought the end would be dark. Going to hell, aren't I? And won't make old bones. But you, sunshine, you, keep breathing, keep trying. Keep coming back."

"To you," Doyle murmured as he dropped off.

> __
> 
> _I don't know how the years will go down, it's all right  
>  Let's make the most of every moment tonight_


End file.
